This year we decided to carry out an activity requested by our local partner, the Beni Department of Education. The activity consisted of a contest of pedagogical proposals prepared and applied by teachers in their classrooms, we launched the call expecting low participation, because in similar events called at the national level, no more than 35 participants were reached. To our surprise, 73 teachers presented their strategies to compete in what was called “Departmental meeting of pedagogical strategies in times of pandemic, for the recovery of the right to education.”
Of the 14 educational districts in Beni, 11 districts submitted proposals; We had all the categories with applicants presenting brand-new pedagogical innovations and implementations of the Alma Foundation’s pedagogical strategies for the 3 levels of education: initial, primary and secondary. Teachers competed in their districts and only the best entry in each category made it to the finals. This past Friday, the departmental evaluation commission reviewed the 29 pre-classified proposals from all over Beni and 11 applicants have been chosen who will defend their work in a virtual session by Zoom in November.
The photographs they sent us of the districts and the reading of the pedagogical proposals sent by the teachers show us that, despite the difficulties and changes, many teachers have managed with effort to implement new forms of teaching, all of them with the inclusion of media, novel pedagogical materials and approaches that invite students to discover, analyze, create, and ponder. For our part, we must say that we are satisfied, because in all the documents we identify the imprints of our work either in the pedagogical planning or in the logic of the applied strategies, and although there is still a lot to work on, we are convinced that the teachers in Beni increasingly improve the teaching-learning process.